CW: death, mass shootings
At 2:00 AM on Sunday, June 12, 2016, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, FL housed roughly 320 people, when a man entered with two semi-automatic rifles and killed 49 people, wounding 53 others.
I woke up that morning, checked the news, and (after a few moments of internally crying/screaming) mentally prepared myself to lead a special prayer time during that morning’s church service.
In the year and a half that I’d pastored our church up to that point, there had been 20 mass shootings in America, and many other disasters (both natural and human-caused) around the world. Every time the world would collectively grieve another horror, we would pray. We’d pray for the families and loved ones of the victims, and we’d pray that the same atrocities would never again occur.
But occur they did.
Over and over and over, tragedies would occur, the world would grieve, and we would pray.
And I was finding myself running out of words to speak.
You can only say “We pray for the victim’s families” so many times before you start to ask “But also God, why are there so many victims?”
You can only say “We pray this doesn’t happen again” so many times before you start to wonder if God’s even listening.1
But on the morning of June 12, 2016, we prayed the same prayers yet again.
Later that week, news organizations released pictures and short bios of all victims of the Pulse nightclub massacre. I sat in my office, reading paragraph after paragraph about children of God, who days before had their lives violently taken from them. I looked into the eyes of the young souls.
Reading through tears, I felt a mix of grief and rage and devastation and anger and shock and sadness.
49 is a big number. When I hear the phrase “49 killed,” I have a hard time wrapping my mind around the reality of what occurred. It’s almost too much tragedy for me to comprehend all at once.
The pictures and the bios made it infinitely more real.
With no words to speak and too many thoughts and emotions to manage, I lit a candle I kept next to my desk in the office. The candle lighting was a simple prayer practice; far too small to properly honor so many children of God.
But words eluded me. Lighting a candle was all I could manage in the moment.
While shopping later that day, I realized that perhaps we should do this as a church.
I bought some tealight candles, and put 49 on some tables in the back of our sanctuary. Behind each tealight I placed a printout of one victim’s picture and bio. The following Sunday our congregation was invited to light a single candle in honor of one of the victims.
The focused nature of this prayer practice was incredibly meaningful to a lot of us that day. Candle lighting was a way for many of us to pray, to grieve, and to remember without trying to find words to speak.
Because sometimes the only adequate words we have are screams and swears.
And screams and swears aren’t always welcomed in a church service.
Massacres and acts of terrorism are often spoken about in the news as large events, but the humanity sometimes gets lost in the process. We can talk about a “mass shooting” all day, but when we talk about the loss of Luis, Peter, Kimberly, and Eric on June 12, 2016, the reality becomes much more personal. I wanted our church to never forget the people behind the news reports.
Candles became a semi-regular part of our worship services after that day. Whenever the world would suffer a tragedy, we had candles available. This practice connected with folks in our church in a way that almost nothing else has. Every time we would have a time of candle lighting and remembrance, I would hear from folks how much it meant to them.
Our world rarely makes space for real, true, honest grief.
For many in our community, this practice offered that kind of space.
I realized pretty quickly that we were burning through tealight candles fast. Tealights are cheap, which is great, but mass shootings (and fires and hurricanes and earthquakes and tsunamis and stabbings and cars mowing down protesters) kept happening, and I was buying more and more small packs of tealights.
One day at IKEA I found out that you can get a hundred tealight candles for around five bucks.
To be honest, they’re crap candles.
They don’t burn for long, and the wax does this weird bubbly thing when it dries.
IKEA tealights are deeply unpleasant.
2/10 do not recommend.
Still, they’re a hundred for five bucks.
I bought three packs. They lived in a drawer behind our sanctuary.
Every time there was a tragedy in the world, I hauled out a bunch of crappy IKEA candles, and we prayed. We grieved. We lamented.
Candle lighting was powerful at the time, and it remains a powerful practice to this day.
However, as we continued this practice over time, something in me changed.
I started to notice the bad news more.
People often tune out when they are inundated with too much bad news. Which makes sense. Too much bad news can send us spiraling mentally and emotionally. It also can cause problems for us physically. Psychotherapist Susanne Babbel says that when we hear about a traumatic event, our bodies go into stress mode. When this happens over and over, our adrenal glands get overwhelmed, and we can go into adrenal fatigue, and adrenal fatigue “can lead to being tired in the morning, lack of restful sleep, anxiety and depression, as well as a multitude of other symptoms.”
Nobody can absorb the firehose of bad news all of the time. It’s too much. It’s pretty natural for us to ignore at least some of the bad news in the world for the sake of our mental and emotional health.
And yet when we started this tealight candle tradition, I found that avoiding bad news became more and more difficult.
When you’re in charge of helping people grieve tragedies, you have to be alert to all of the tragedies. So I paid attention. And once I was attentive, I noticed how many tragedies happen in a month. Sometimes within the same week.
There were times when we would have candle services for mass shootings two or three times in a month.
Providing candles as a grief practice made me aware of the sheer amount of tragedies that happen in the world on a weekly basis.
If it wasn’t mass shootings, we would light candles for hurricane victims, or tornado victims, or earthquake victims, or flood victims, or an unarmed black teenager being shot and killed, or the bombing of a marketplace, or any other number of tragedies.
At some point, my mind, my heart, and my spirit were no longer able to make sense of a God who was good and kind and loving; a God who was able to stop any of this horror.
It’s not like there were no tragedies before I was a pastor.
But before that time, I could tune out if I needed. I didn’t have to ingest the firehose of bad news each and every week.
But now I did. I had to help others grieve, cope, and make sense of a senseless world. I was going up on stage every week and saying “Evil happens in the world, but God is still good.”
Problem was, I wasn’t sure I believed that anymore.
I noticed how many horrors happened week in and week out.
Every week I was leading our church in praying that God’s goodness would overcome evil.
And the following week more people would die.
And once again, I would haul out the damn candles.
Resources
There are people far more qualified than me talking about faith doubt and deconstruction online, with more varied experiences than I have. At the end of every I spotlight three other folks or resources that have been helpful to me and might also be helpful to you if you find yourself in the middle of a faith shift of some kind.
And yet even in my darkest moments of doubt I have consistently found tremendous value in corporate prayer. Whether or not there’s a God listening, and whether or not our prayers are going to spur this God on to action, a collective remembering, speaking, listening, and grieving are good for the soul.
I love this practice, but yes, I can see how that trains your mind to see tragedy everywhere! What holy work it is to guide others through grief!